This was a tricky but fun job. Rich knew he wanted a war veteran in a wheelchair but couldn’t find a suitable figure. No problem – I will make you one. The wheelchair was scratch built in nickel silver and brass and the figure is a lightly converted Dapol figure. The other soldier is made by Dart Castings.

Sometimes a client will come to me with a very firm idea of what they want – this job was one of those. One of the figures needed a new hair do sculpting on. I am sure you can guess who these two shopkeepers are.

I had a customer who needed some figures to show some refitting of the overhead lines on a trolley bus that was on his model railway layout. After checking the height of the wire on his layout I came up with these two converted figures for hiem.

I have recently been refining a different painting style for my 7mm figures.

I was using a similar style for these as the one I was using on my 4mm figures and I wasn’t completely convinced it suited 7mm figures as well.

It has taken quite a bit of experimentation to get this to where I want – thank heavens you can easily strip metal figures off and try again. I like to refer to these figures as ‘Splash Test Dummies’.

I have a few refinements to try but this is the direction I am now heading in for 7mm. The basic technique is using artists inks.

I wanted to desaturate the colours without losing all the contrast. what I have aimed for is the colour depth that we are used to seeing in older colour photographs and then knocking that back even further to demonstrate the change of colours when seen at a distance – scale colouration of you like.